620 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
direct experience; and the critical question was whether a scientifically
warrantable worship of a visible and tangible human idol would now
follow up a victory over the scientifically exploded worship of Cybele by
also putting to rout a worship of God—considering that a faith which
was 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen',1
was the only justification for worshipping a God whom no man had seen
at any time.2 'Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed
by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of
things which do appear';3 but this faith was not countenanced by
Science; and, long before Man had been led into a temptation to worship
the Human Mind by the intellectually triumphant sequel to a seven-
teenth-century Western Scientific Revolution, Man-worship had already
come to be the characteristic idolatry of Man in Process of Civilization,
since one aspect of Civilization had been Man's progressive conquest of
Non-Human Nature.

The response to the challenge of this first wave of Man-worship had
been the epiphany of the higher religions; and it had been no accident
that these had made their appearance and won their footing at times and
places at which human beings had temporarily learnt the salutary lesson
of disillusionment with Civilization from the suffering that had been in-
flicted on them by the breakdowns and disintegrations of the civiliza-
tions of an early generation. The spiritually educative effects of this
creative experience of suffering had, however, afterwards been over-
whelmed by the impetus of the triumphant resurgence of Civilization in
the Modern Age of a Western Society's history. The evidence of things
not seen had been rejected, and the substance of things hoped for
had been devalued, by a Modern Western Man from whom a Western-
izing majority of Mankind had latterly been learning to take its cue.
Was this the last word in the story? The four principal surviving
higher religions—the Mahayana, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam—
had all consistently spoken with one voice in proclaiming the truth that
Man was not God. Was their consensus on this negative yet crucial
point now to be overruled in a second reading of the bill ? A Christian
Church Militant had started its career by challenging a cult of Dea Roma
and Divus Caesar that had been one of the most respectable and bene-
ficent expressions of Man-worship so far devised. Were the heirs of the
Christian martyrs who had given their lives to win the Church's battle
against the deification of an Hellenic universal state now to capitulate to
the worship of Leviathan in the cruder and wickeder latter-day Western
forms of Fascism and Communism? The key to an answer to this
question was to be found in the significance and prospects of a current
domestic controversy within the bosom of the neo-pagan church whose
religion was the worship of Humanity.

In an earlier chapter of this Part4 we have already noticed that the
real issue between Communism and a traditional Western way of life
was not the economic issue between Socialism and Freedom for Private
Economic Enterprise which was the ostensible subject of contention. We

i Heb. xi. i. 2 i John iv. 12.

3 Heb. ad. 3. * On p. 584, above.